Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

In fact, I only buy my produce from my local farmer's market and am learning to eat seasonally. Since reading this book I can't reach for a pepper at the grocery store without wondering where it came from, how many miles it traveled, or how it was grown. I think this book could have stood a lot of editing and found it difficult to finish, even though I appreciated the insight into her family's 'experiment'. There is a preachiness here that even I found tedious as much as I might be in agreement with the POV. I thought their voices interrupted the narrative and imagine that in the printed text these are sidebars - extras that could be skipped over if you already 'got it' that you should only buy fair-trade coffee and that meat from supermarkets is from mistreated animals. And EATING! The descriptions of mouth-watering meals made me hungry! Dislikes: I personally didn't respond to the contributions of her husband and daughter in this audiobook.

She skillfully and lyrically describes the wonder of watching vegetables and animals grow and ponders the ethics and traditions of our food choices.

Her knowledgeable and thoughtful observations were well-stated but not dry. Likes: I already knew I liked Barbara Kingsolver's books and her particular viewpoint resonates with me. I think I agree with other reviews that this particular book might be best left to print rather than spoken word. Part memoir and part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life and diversified farms at the center of the American diet. The environmental costs are also high, and the nutritional sacrifice is undeniable: on our modern industrial food supply, Americans are now raising the first generation of children to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. Americans spend less of their income on food than has any culture in the history of the world, but they pay dearly in other ways: losing the flavors, diversity, and creative food cultures of earlier times. In their search for another way to eat and live, they begin to recover what Kingsolver considers our nation's lost appreciation for farms and the natural processes of food production. They find themselves eager to move away from the typical food scenario of American families: a refrigerator packed with processed, factory-farmed foods transported long distances using nonrenewable fuels. When Barbara Kingsolver and her family move from suburban Arizona to rural Appalachia, they take on a new challenge: to spend a year on a locally-produced diet, paying close attention to the provenance of all they consume.Īnimal, Vegetable, Miracle follows the family through the first year of their experiment.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver